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Microsoft announces the Surface Pro 3

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Re: Microsoft announces the Surface Pro 3

#171

Post by dragonwriter »

BugBrother wrote: post #100
danudey wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that really speaks to Microsoft's new direction though. It's funny, because it used to be that everything Microsoft did was in furtherance of the 'Windows über alles' philosophy, that Microsoft can only win if everyone else loses. Within that philosophy, though, there was no direction. You drank the kool-aid, and then your team just did whatever; see the famous example of the Office manager hating the idea of…

Well, the iPad owns the tablet app world, Microsoft didn't have much choice. When [/if] Office is released for many of the differing O/S and hardware versions of Android, I'll agree your description have a point. Edit: Close enough, dragonwriter. I yield the point. (I should have known about this. Also, why is there such a lack of optimized pad sized apps for Android? The phone ones I've seen weren't exactly using th…

> Also, why is there such a lack of optimized pad sized apps for Android?

I suspect because Android has had significant smartphone marketshare for longer and only comparatively recently bumped over iOS in tablet marketshare, so developers targetting Android have been largely targetting it for phone apps. Fragmentation and demographics probably still make iOS much more lucrative for tablet apps (as it still is, AFAIK, for smartphone apps), but the marketshare numbers are such that the lack of tablet apps for Android should start resolving itself, the same way the lack of phone apps did.

Re: Microsoft announces the Surface Pro 3

#172

Post by sliverstorm »

dragonwriter wrote: post #120
sliverstorm wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you print your letters on US Legal or something like that?

> Do you print your letters on US Legal or something like that? No, "letter size" was a reference to US Letter, which is 8.5"x11", which has a 13.9" diagonal, so a 14" screen would be about right (a little small for a 100% display if it is 3:2, because US Letter has a 1.29:1 aspect ratio rather than 1.5:1.) US Legal is 8.5"x14" which is closer to 3:2 (1.65:1) but also 16.4" diagonal.

Whoops, forgot about the difference was of measuring screens & paper...

Re: Microsoft announces the Surface Pro 3

#173

Post by vxNsr »

tdicola wrote: post #29

Really akward that they made a point of saying the device is 'fanless' when it clearly has a fan and vents around the side. Sure it might be a very nice and quiet fan, but it sounds disingenuous to be saying there isn't one.

Yeah I watched the event and I didn't understand that part, he first called it fanless and then waxed poetic about how nice and hidden the vent is and how thin the fan is. Maybe marketing told him that it was okay?

Re: Microsoft announces the Surface Pro 3

#174

Post by nivla »

freehunter wrote: post #155
dragonwriter wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When [/if] Office is released for many of the differing O/S and hardware versions of Android, I'll agree your description have a point. There's a phone version for Android 4.0+, but not yet a tablet version.

Meanwhile there's not a Windows Phone version of Google anything.

I am fine with it. The are alternative for most Google products. Personally, the only thing I miss is Youtube, which ironically MS made best version out there (No ads, downloadable video and worked without crashing) before Google forced them to take it out.

Interestingly, Google has all its products out for the desktop version on Windows 8.

Re: Microsoft announces the Surface Pro 3

#175

Post by slantyyz »

c0ldfusion wrote: post #147

No wonder it's cheaper - N-trig instead of Wacom. (I'm not commenting on the technical merits of either choice, just that one tends to be cheaper than the other.)

The parallax and purported improvements in accuracy are a big deal though. Even with a >100 point calibration, the stylus on my Surface Pro gets weird tracking on the screen's edges or when the pen is held at off angles.

I was sold once Panay clicked the Stylus and popped up OneNote instantly. There's a lot of value in that for people like me who still prefer to use a pen to take notes.

Re: Microsoft announces the Surface Pro 3

#176

Post by Crito »

mrec wrote: post #116
daigoba66 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're going to live forever disappointed. The command prompt shell is one of those programs that just doesn't get updated and/or any new features. Like notepad.exe, there are so many easy things they could do to make it actually _useful_, but won't.

Not disagreeing, but I suspect notepad.exe is the way it is for a reason - it's the Windows equivalent of vi, the thing you use to try to recover when everything else is falling to pieces. As such, it doesn't and shouldn't have dependencies on anything that isn't absolutely essential. I believe Task Manager eschews the common control library and reimplements a lot of UI stuff itself. Same reason.

You don't really need to pull in external deps to improve notepad.exe; nearly all of the low-hanging fruit would be a few lines of code in that application itself. Even busybox's vi implementation is a more capable editor, and it's one short C file (with a handful of trivial deps on the rest of busybox for shit like the allocator and random string functions.)

Re: Microsoft announces the Surface Pro 3

#177

Post by dragonwriter »

nivla wrote: post #174
freehunter wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile there's not a Windows Phone version of Google anything.

I am fine with it. The are alternative for most Google products. Personally, the only thing I miss is Youtube, which ironically MS made best version out there (No ads, downloadable video and worked without crashing) before Google forced them to take it out. Interestingly, Google has all its products out for the desktop version on Windows 8.

> Interestingly, Google has all its products out for the desktop version on Windows 8.

Comparing Windows 8.x's desktop marketshare with Windows Phone's mobile marketshare might give a clue as to the reason why Google has apps for the former but not the latter.

Re: Microsoft announces the Surface Pro 3

#178

Post by yuhong »

bri3d wrote: post #90
ggreer wrote: post #50

That's a really nice piece of hardware. I've used MacBook Airs since 2010, but the Surface 3 looks to be strictly dominating in the hardware department. Unfortunately, I don't think Microsoft will convert many OS X devs unless they make some changes to their software. One of the advantages of OS X is that it's a Unix, and lots of Unix software runs on it. It's not hard to compile tools such as nmap, Vim, or steam loc…

You mean like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX ? In my experience Cygwin works better for the "compile software targeted mostly at Linux users" use case, but Microsoft definitely pursued the "make Windows a Unix" approach. Sadly Interix saw limited adoption (probably due to pricing) and has been discontinued, so we're left with the user-space emulation approaches (like Cygwin).

Yea, I wonder if MS can bring it back in the next version of Windows.

Re: Microsoft announces the Surface Pro 3

#180

Post by emehrkay »

ggreer wrote: post #50

That's a really nice piece of hardware. I've used MacBook Airs since 2010, but the Surface 3 looks to be strictly dominating in the hardware department. Unfortunately, I don't think Microsoft will convert many OS X devs unless they make some changes to their software. One of the advantages of OS X is that it's a Unix, and lots of Unix software runs on it. It's not hard to compile tools such as nmap, Vim, or steam loc…

Id honestly love a dock-able iPad with a sandboxed OSX app. <-- this is my prediction as to where Apple is going. They won't merge the two OSes. One would assume that they already have an arm version of OS X running, emulation probably isn't strong enough yet.
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